Abstract

This study is devoted to verify the SACATRI thermalhydraulic code established for the Moroccan TRIGA MARK II research reactor. This code permits the calculation of steady state single phase of laminar flow in natural convection regime. The thermalhydraulic model adopted here is based on the subchannel approach. It has been chosen as it gives the most accurate and practical representation of pin bundle. The governing thermalhydraulic equations are discretised using finite difference method (FDM) on staggered Cartesian grid systems. Second order central difference scheme is used to approximate convective and source terms. The SIMPLE algorithm is adopted to resolve the coupling between velocity and pressure. Verification of calculation involves error estimation. In this paper we propose a benchmark test with analytical solution allowing the error estimation and verification of the 3D thermalhydraulic code. The benchmark test proposed here is based on the method of manufactured solutions (MMS). This method consists in the generation of an exact solution of partial differential equations constructed by solving the problem backward. The proposed benchmark test is used efficiently for the estimation of errors and the verification of the 3D SACATRI code established for the Moroccan TRIGA MARK II research reactor.